|
|
| photo: Lily Dong Photography | |
Rita Chang-Eppig received her MFA from New York University. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2021, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, Clarkesworld, Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. Her debut novel, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea (Bloomsbury, May 30, 2023), is about a legendary pirate queen of China.
Handsell readers your book in approximately 25 words or less:
Based on the life of a legendary pirate queen, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea follows Shek Yeung's rise from peasant to commander of the most powerful fleet in China.
On your nightstand now:
Vajra Chandrasekera's The Saint of Bright Doors. I read a short story of his a while back and went from not knowing who he was to devoted fan in the span of approximately 20 pages. He is such an intellectual writer, and his prose sings. When I heard he had a novel coming out, I immediately preordered a copy. And then, because I am bad at delayed gratification, I also contacted him and begged for a galley. He was kind enough to send me one.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Mary Poppins books before I realized they were racist. Sometimes I wonder about the nice librarian who recommended those books to me. I also read all those Goosebumps books, even though I was (and am) a complete chicken. I'd borrow maybe three books at once from the library, read them over the span of two days, and then spend the rest of the week unable to sleep. So on top of being bad at delayed gratification, I'm apparently also bad at impulse control.
Your top five authors:
This is an impossible question, so let's go with the ones I loved most when I first started writing and, therefore, probably influenced my writing the most: Shirley Jackson, Gabriel García Márquez, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, and Jhumpa Lahiri.
Book you've faked reading:
I, uh, still haven't read Moby-Dick. At this point I don't even feel that bad about it anymore.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Yōko Ogawa's collection of short stories, Revenge. (Caveat: I read the edition translated by Stephen Snyder, but I don't speak Japanese, so I can't comment on how faithful the translation is to the original.) Ogawa is primarily known for her novels The Housekeeper and the Professor and The Memory Police (understandably, as both are great books), but I love a creepy, surreal short story collection, and I don't think Revenge gets talked about enough when people talk about slipstream collections. (I'm using slipstream here for lack of a better label.) Each story builds beautifully upon the one before it and lingers in your mind for a long time.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I'd heard good things about Elaine Hsieh Chou's Disorientation, but the cover really sold it for me. I believe she reached out to artists Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland. The bright pink is eye-catching, sure, but there's also something subversive about it. It's a slightly sickly, Pepto-Bismol pink, hinting that something is wrong, even if that something is just the main character's ongoing dyspepsia. Each of the items strewn about the room also ties well into an element of the book.
Book you hid from your parents:
None, actually. A blessing and curse of growing up in a household in which you read a language different from your parents is that there is virtually no oversight in terms of what you read. Obviously, I couldn't bring home romance novels with ripped bodices on the cover, but I also wasn't very interested in those. So as a young teen, I was reading a lot of Anne Rice novels, with all their eroticism and murder and contemplations of mortality. But I don't know, I think I turned out okay.
Book that changed your life:
I first read Lee A. Tonouchi's Da Word in college, and it completely upended everything I thought I knew about Serious Literature. My lit classes up to that point had very much inculcated in me this belief in the existence of "good" or "proper" English. Of course, what's considered "good" is greatly influenced by race, class, etc. Tonouchi, a pidgin activist, wrote Da Word in pidgin. Reading it not only expanded my sense of what writing and language could be, but also enlightened me on cultural-linguistic hegemony.
Favorite line from a book:
The opening line from Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, "Nuns go by as quiet as lust, and drunken men and sober eyes sing in the lobby of the Greek hotel." That one little phrase "Nuns go by as quiet as lust" taught me approximately 90% of what I needed to know about writing a good simile.
Five books you'll never part with:
I don't understand. Why would you part with a book? You collect books until your study is full and your partner yells at you to "stop buying physical books already because we might need to move soon, and also I refuse to build more IKEA bookcases."
But here are five authors/books I haven't mentioned yet: Ken Liu's The Paper Menagerie, Karen Russell's Vampires in the Lemon Grove, Jeanette Winterson's The Passion, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, and Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Mariana Enríquez's Things We Lost in the Fire. It is the perfect short story collection--I will fight anyone who disagrees. But the "problem" with horror writing is that once you know what's going to happen, it becomes less scary, at least for me. Don't get me wrong, I continually reread those stories because they have so much to teach me about mood, setting, description, and so forth, but the fear factor is gone. It would be nice to read it again for the first time.